It’s about time we give attention to an incredible (and often overlooked) phenomena in the typography and design world.

For those that aren’t familiar, microsites are basically digital adaptations of type specimens. For those that aren’t familiar with type specimens (don’t be embarrassed, we’re all learning here), type specs have been used to advertise and promote typeface designs since the early days of metal type. Microsites exist for the same purpose, carry a similar spirit, yet are fairly unknown to those outside of the really nerdy type-isphere. Which sucks.

It’s not every day you get to redesign a product used by hundreds of thousands of people, virtually overnight. But that’s what happened when we launched Mercury Reader, a Google Chrome plugin for formatting articles into a clean reader view.